This useful new capability from Google tracks search behavior for users. Wouldn’t it be cool if BI users could navigate their past queries with this type of interface?

SAP BW Web Reports do have the ability to save query results at any navigational step in a bookmark, but currently the SAP BW bookmark “history” is completely dependent upon the user for identification of the criteria used for the creation of the SAP BW Bookmark URL, and the proper labeling and storage for the bookmark URL in the users favorities. This labeling is completely on the client side as well, and can easily be destroyed if the client favorites are deleted, and are inaccessible from other locations / clients.

If readers of this blog posting are aware of other technologies that provide BI navigational search history management tools, please post a reply to this blog entry, or send an email.

Say goodbye to bookmarks: Google has rolled out a seriously cool search history feature that automatically keeps track of all of your web searches and every page that you view from search results.

The new Google My Search History feature is a beta application launched in Google labs. To use it, you need to have an active Google account (Gmail, Google Groups or Google Answers—registration is free). From that point on, all of your queries and search results are logged by Google.

My Search History differs from the automatic caching feature in the Google Desktop application, which saves copies of web pages you’ve viewed on your personal computer. My Search History doesn’t save web pages; rather, it saves your search behavior, and makes it easy to rediscover both your past queries and the search result pages you’ve viewed.

“We view this product as a complement to the desktop search,” said Marissa Mayer, Director of Consumer Web Products.

Unlike personalization options from Yahoo and Ask Jeeves that are hidden away and have their own interface, Google’s My Search History integrates directly into the main Google search and result pages. And you don’t have to do anything special, such as explicitly select search results, to make it work.

Using the application is easy. Simply enter your query in a Google search box and click the additional “Search History” button that is installed next to the familiar “Search Web” button.

Results are displayed in what Google calls the Main View for your search history.
Results on this view are ordered by date, with your most recent searches appearing at the top. Each of your search queries is displayed as a linked, boldfaced term. To re-run a search, simply click the link. Beneath each search term is a list of results that you viewed from that search, along with the time and number of times you’ve viewed each page.

A calendar on the right side of the result page allows you to access the searches you did on a particular date. Color on a date box on the calendar shows the number of searches you did on that day. White means zero, and shades of green from lighter to darker indicate heavier usage.

As you build a search history, Google begins to cluster results from related queries together, making it easier to find conceptually similar results even if you can’t recall the exact search terms you used. “We’re running some interesting clustering and related algorithms to understand whether you’ve searched for topics like this in the past,” said Mayer.

The more search history Google has to work with, the better the related results, at least in theory. “The interesting thing about these products is that it really does take a while to build up enough history to be useful,” said Mayer.

My Search History also integrates with Google web search. If relevant results from your history are available for a Google web search, you’ll see My Search History results in the “one-box” area at the top of the result page. Google also displays one-box results when it finds relevant links from Google News, shopping, local or desktop search results.

How does Google determine when to display one-box results? If you’re running the Google Desktop application, these results from your own computer will override My Search History results. In other cases, it’s less clear whether you’ll see one-box results or not.

“We’re actively tuning our one box triggers to deliver the most relevant results possible,” said Mayer, adding that she saw a query that returned four sets of one-box results and she felt that was too many.

Editing Your Search History

To enable My Search History, you need to activate it and start searching. Google has not saved any of your previous queries, so you’ll be starting with a clean slate the first time you use the application.

What if you don’t want some of your search history saved? Google provides several mechanisms to control what’s included in your own history.

A “pause” link displayed at the top of search results serves as a toggle, temporarily halting the recording of your search results until you enable it again. You can also edit your search history, deleting queries and search results that you don’t want included.

“I personally think the right way to control what’s in your search history is to go in and retroactively remove items that bother you,” said Mayer. “That way you don’t have to worry about it ahead of time.”

Of course, you can also simply sign off and use the standard Google service if you don’t want your search activities recorded. You can also delete the service entirely via the My Account settings for your Google account.

If you opt to use My Search History, you should take the time to review Google’s privacy policy and terms of service. Google is quite upfront about the types of information it collects and how it’s used, as well as the safeguards it has in place to protect your privacy.

Google says it will not disclose the personal information it collects to other companies or individuals, with a few exceptions. Nonetheless, you should read the policy yourself to decide whether you’re comfortable with these disclosures.

Google vs. Other Personalized Search Tools
Google has set a new standard for usefulness and ease of use with My Search History. Ask Jeeves and Yahoo introduced personalization features last year, and AOL Search added a nifty search history feature with its recent upgrade. But none are as compelling as My Search History.

Ask Jeeves introduced My Jeeves in September 2004. Danny weighed in with comments about the new service in a blog post, noting that it really amounted to baby steps toward personalization by Ask Jeeves. He also noted that MSN was the first to introduce personal search history in 1999 via Internet Explorer, but this program was quietly withdrawn.

I wrote about My Yahoo Search in the SearchDay article Yahoo Introduces Personal Search, back in October 2004. While I was reasonably impressed with the service, I concluded that it didn’t offer compelling reasons to use it unless you were looking for what amounts to an enhanced bookmark utility that’s tied to Yahoo search results.

Other services such as A9.com and Eurekster have offered personalized search for some time.

But all of these are one-step away from being directly integrated with a major search engine. Google’s My Search History doesn’t replace all of the features these other programs offer—at least not yet. But it is the strongest personal search offering from a major search engine to date, and is something most frequent Google users will want to set up and use on a regular basis.

Don’t expect Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, MSN or AOL Search to stand still. Personalized search has long been touted as one of the holy grails for the industry. This year the promise is finally being realized in a way that strikes the appropriate balance between useful results and privacy concerns. Beginning today with Google’s launch of My Search History, I expect to see major leaps ahead in the arena of personalized search—and that’s a good thing.

WHITTMANHART Selected by New York Blower for Oracle ImplementationThursday April 14, 7:45 am ET
CHICAGO, April 14 /PRNewswire/ — WHITTMANHART, a leader in providing integrated solutions in digital communications, process improvement and enabling technologies, announced today that it has been selected by The New York Blower Company as the implementation partner for its transition from its legacy based operations system to the Oracle E-Business Suite of applications. By fully integrating Oracle into New York Blower’s business operations, WHITTMANHART will enable New York Blower to successfully introduce an effective enterprise resource planning system to support the company’s continued growth in the marketplace.
“With WHITTMANHART’s assistance, we expect this project to help us improve our quote to order process, control manufacturing costs, better plan material needs, and provide increased visibility of customer orders,” said New York Blower’s Vice President of Finance, Joe Centers.
WHITTMANHART was selected due to their extensive Oracle implementation experience. As an Oracle Certified Partner and Special Addition Partner with over 10 years of deep Oracle experience and over 30 Oracle consultants, WHITTMANHART was found to be the best partner for this six month phase one rollout.
“WHITTMANHART was a natural partner choice for Oracle due to its ongoing success in delivering Oracle solutions to mid-market manufacturing and distribution companies,” said Ted Stuart, Oracle Applications Regional Sales Manager. “They simply understand this market’s need for strong industry and functional experience plus a practical implementation approach and a proven implementation methodology.”
“We are proud to continue our ongoing relationship with the New York Blower Company,” said Bill Topel, WHITTMANHART Vice President of Sales. “With the implementation of the Oracle E-Business Suite, The New York Blower Company will transform their business processes due to a more efficient, flexible and scalable infrastructure which will generate greater staff productivity and provide better service to customers.”
About WHITTMANHART
Headquartered in Chicago, WHITTMANHART is a premier services company providing integrated solutions in digital communications, process improvement and enabling technologies. WHITTMANHART draws on over 20 years of quality work, strong client relationships and value-driven solutions for focused industries to deliver best-in-class solutions to all our clients. WHITTMANHART currently has three major business divisions: Interactive, Performance Management and Managed Hosting. To learn more about any of these divisions, please visit their website at http://www.whittmanhart.com .
About The New York Blower Company
The New York Blower Company has been designing and building fans and blowers to move air in all types of commercial and industrial applications for 115 years. Today, New York Blower has one of the most comprehensive lines of fans and blowers in the world, with literally hundreds of designs and models available. Consistent capital investment has resulted in the most modern equipment and facilities in the industry. This allows New York Blower to offer an unmatched combination of technology and manufacturing expertise. Their fan designs provide the highest aerodynamic efficiencies compatible with specific systems and gas stream requirements. Fan structures are designed for long life in industrial applications. But beyond the state-of-the-art machines that make quality and efficient fans possible, is a dedicated team of people who have pride in what they manufacture. Their world wide network of sales engineers located in 65 cities in North America and all major regions around the globe have a depth of experience unsurpassed in the industry. You can learn more about New York Blower by visiting its Web site at http://www.nyb.com .
Source: WHITTMANHART, Inc.

I’m familiar with the wonderfully effective http://planetfeedback.com site, which provides a single “service complaint portal” (and to be fair also for positive feedback).

But on the business side of the equation, Intelliseek, which owns PlanetFeedback, has powerful web-based business intelligence tools and services that help companies use high-tech datamining tools to glean customer attitudinal data from the web and other sources.

“We are among the first companies to pioneer the concept of 360-degree marketing intelligence, challenging companies and brands to look holistically across all their consumer or customer touch points. We’ve married this business concept with world-class discovery and mining technology, and we deliver high-impact marketing automation and marketing transformation solutions to progressive marketers, researchers and analysts.

Technology leadership is another distinguishing characteristic that sets us apart. Since 1997 and through a series of technology and corporate acquisitions, we have focused on developing a type of technology that answers the fundamental question: ‘how can we improve professionals’ research and analysis capabilities, how can we leverage the exponentially growing amount of unstructured content that exists within and outside any organization, company or enterprise?’

We are leaders in federated content discovery technologies, providing access to more sources, more data types and more languages than other vendors. We provide rich administration tools to add/remove new content sources. We specialize in industry-standard, open architecture and APIs for seamless integration into any large enterprise network, and we create user-friendly applications.

We are leading with content mining technologies featuring classifiers/categorizers that are suitable to different types of content and state-of the art machine-learning techniques that extract entities, relationships, sentiments, facts and events from unstructured data.

We have unique methodologies and step-by-step processes in which disparate, unstructured content is converted into actionable business intelligence — charts, graphs and alerts.”

Here is information on a specific solution offering – BrandPulse.

BrandPulse Internetâ„¢
What is BrandPulse Internetâ„¢?
BrandPulse Internetâ„¢ is an Internet Monitoring application that helps marketers, market researchers and product developers measure and track the pulse of consumer “buzz” about any brand, company, or emerging issue. The BrandPulse Internet solution collects and analyzes content from public online databases and discussion boards, and it reports actionable insights via a convenient digital dashboard. BrandPulse represents Real-time Marketing Intelligence at its best.

How Can BrandPulse Internetâ„¢ Help You?
Online consumer discussion data is reported in an easy-to-use, sophisticated desktop analytical tool. The BrandPulse Internet solution can search millions of data points to tell your company:

Whatâ€™s the buzz about my brand/show? Is it growing? Shrinking?
Is my advertising message penetrating the clutter of other branding noise?
Where are people hanging out on the Internet to discuss my brand, my competitors?
What new products/product improvements should be made?
What are the new phrases, ideas and concepts being discussed on the Internet about my brand?
How does the Internet influence consumer purchase decisions and brand loyalty?
Twenty percent of consumers who purchased a 2001 or 2002 vehicle sought the advice of other consumers online before they bought. Based on 2002 automotive sales figures, thatâ€™s about 3 million consumers! With the rapid growth of Internet message boards and discussion rooms about a wide range of products and services, companies can no longer afford to look at online consumer discussion data anecdotally. Thanks to Intelliseekâ€™s technology, this data is carefully sorted and analyzed, supplementing traditional research data and providing a 360-view of consumer understanding. Our clients say it is some of the best research available for Marketing Intelligence.

How Can BrandPulse Internetâ„¢ Be Used?
BrandPulse Applications/Modules/Uses

Reputation Management
Buzz Measurement and Analysis
Marketing Message Optimization/Advertisement Effectiveness
New Initiative/Product Assessment
Competitive Analysis/Intelligence
Product Research and Trend Analysis
Customer Satisfaction & Loyalty Management
BrandPulse Internet is Unique
Other vendors offer clipping services, surveys or some Internet monitoring, but their clients are often left with mountains of uninterpreted data or minimal support for analyzing the collected information. BrandPulse goes a step further, thanks to the search technology that powers it. Its proprietary methodology includes four phases: discovery, mining, analysis, and reporting.

Content Discovery: The BrandPulse solution scours the Internet to find relevant discussions about brands, issues, trends and hot topics, and BrandPulse’s broad coverage finds and collects conversations happening on the Internet across three main areas: Large Portals (USENET, general interest sites, etc.), Industry Verticals (specialized sites, such as automotive or health web sites) and MicroSites and smaller communities, including web logs. Intelliseek can add new discussions as they emerge or can go back in time across information that’s been indexed over the past three years.

Content Mining: Intelliseek’s content mining capabilities are rooted in machine-learning and natural language processing technologies that mine unstructured data — vast amounts of raw text — to discover the intelligence it contains. These technologies are able to identify key phrases and words, detect the nature and strength of sentiment in text, classify and categorize data to provide meaning and relevance, and extract specific facts and data points to create the meaning and context that lead to intelligence.

Analysis: Data is sorted by source, volume, and other metrics that help provide insights on concepts, sentiments and trends in consumer opinions. The analysis tools provide totally new ways of considering and measuring marketing data and factors, including competitive benchmarks, overall consumer “buzz” about certain products or brands, and the likelihood of active, influential consumers spreading their opinion and influence to others (virality).

Reporting: Once information is discovered, the BrandPulse solution is able to break down information about brands, companies or issues across any number of metrics, all in near real-time. We are able to create thousands of reports in a customized manner for any client.

The result? Marketers, market researchers and business development professionals get a holistic view of customer insights in order to make smarter, more informed, strategic marketing decisions. Plans can be executed efficiently and intelligently.